HP OfficeJet 6500 Wireless All-in-One Review

All-in-ones for small offices and home offices are becoming more sophisticated and better suited to the needs of remote workers. This latest HP offering includes photo printing, full faxing, duplex printing and wireless connectivity. HP has also taken a step to lower printing costs, a long-term bugbear for many inkjet customers, claiming that prints from the OfficeJet 6500 wireless can cost up to 40 percent less than from an equivalent color laser printer. Given that there aren’t many color lasers that cost under £180, least of all multifunction devices like this, it probably makes sense.

Featuring HP’s new black and white business inkjet finish, the OfficeJet 6500 Wireless certainly looks functional. Its nearly flat 30-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) has a sweeping quill at the end of the input tray, and a mix of textured and high-gloss black gives the machine character.

The comparably small and therefore all the busier control panel still includes separate functional areas for scan, photo, copy and fax and there’s a full number pad for fax dialing as well as 100 speed dials, which should be enough for most SOHO customers.

Although there is no color LCD display, the two-line, backlit, mono LCD provides sufficient feedback for most applications. HP scrolls a variety of different status and instructional messages through the screen to provide feedback. Below the control panel is the machine’s single input tray, which can hold up to 250 sheets of plain paper or, alternatively, glossy paper for photo prints.

As usual with HP devices, the output tray fits directly over the input tray and, when fully extended, protrudes far forward from the front of the device, as it must be when printing. There are two memory card slots on the lower left of the front, but these are no longer suitable for CompactFlash cards, only for MemoryCard, SD and xD. There’s also no USB socket on the front, which is a shame as they can now often be used to print from and scan directly to USB drives.

The rear has ports for USB, Ethernet, and a fax cord and optional handset, but many customers will opt for the wireless connection, and the OfficeJet 6500 Wireless is remarkably easy to set up. Although you’ll need to temporarily connect the device to a PC via USB – there’s a cable in the box – once you’ve selected wireless connection, the whole setup is completed automatically. You won’t even be asked for your WEP key. We are still considering whether this is an advantage for usability or a disadvantage for network security.

The device uses a plug-in printhead with four ink cartridges that plug into the head itself. This arrangement and the appearance of the cartridges themselves suggest that either HP took a good look at Canon’s cartridge design or that Canon is making the supplies for this device. It’s obvious that Canon has been making HP laser machines for years, so perhaps the collaboration will now extend to inkjet printers as well.

The standard software package you would expect from a modern HP all-in-one, including basic OCR and management of scanning and printing, is provided and the device can be connected to versions of Windows 2000 or later, or OS X 10.4 and higher will . Using Linux is supported by HPLIP and is known to work with versions of SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and Debian.

The ISO standard for speed tests seems to have made some impression on the silly numbers often given for print speeds. HP specifies a much more rational 8.2 ppm for black and white printing and 5.4 ppm for color in normal printing mode. Our five-page text print delivered a real speed of 4.17ppm, but when we increased the document length to 20ppm, it was 8.96ppm, more than half appm faster than the rated speed.

Our black text and color graphics print returned 3.90ppm, a bit slower than claimed but not bad overall. However, it has to be said that the device fiddles around a lot with its ink cartridges before printing. This wasted 15 to 38 seconds per job during testing, presumably depending on what needed charging.

Photo print speeds, on the other hand, are pretty amazing for a machine that doesn’t specialize in image printing. A 15 x 10 cm photo print from the PC onto A4 paper took just 51 seconds, and when we were printing from an SD card onto a 15 x 10 cm blank the time reduced to 41 seconds.

You might expect quality to suffer when printing at these speeds, but our results were up to HP’s usual high standards. Color transitions are smooth and while there is some loss of shadow detail, it should be relatively easy to compensate.

The print quality on plain paper is also fine. While it doesn’t match HP’s claimed laser quality, it’s still very clean, with minimal ink bleed. The only place this isn’t true is when copying black text. Printing, while still adequate, is a little blurrier, and bold headings look particularly overcolored. Color printing on plain paper is good, with vibrant colors and accurate registration.

One set of color cartridges is available for this device, although two black cartridges are available. The higher yield XL set offers 700 color pages and 1,200 black and white pages, putting it at the lower end of the laser printer world. Cartridge prices are pretty reasonable too, giving a cost per page of 2.28p for black and white and 5.41p for color, both including 0.7p for paper, as we always do.

This cost is more than comparable to entry-level color laser printers. In fact, HP’s claim of a 40 percent saving, especially when you factor in color printing costs, looks conservative.

verdict

The OfficeJet 6500 Wireless is a well-equipped SOHO all-in-one, and HP has obviously gone to great lengths to reduce the cost of ownership. Print speeds are actually close to what the manufacturer claims, and unexpectedly fast in the case of photo prints. The only missing feature we could wish for is that USB socket on the front, but maybe that’s unkind.

points in detail

• print speed 8

• functions 9

• value 9

• print quality 8

characteristics

To press

to scan